Secondhand Time

I’m back to reading something serious now, after my side foray into a silly satirical murder novel. Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets is an as-told-to history of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its aftermath, and it is just devastating. I’m about two thirds of the way through it, and I can’t stop thinking about how much the Russian people have suffered and lost; and how much suffering and loss they have inflicted. Russia has been an experimental laboratory for all of the worst economic and government systems that humankind has dreamed up - Tsarism and serfdom, Soviet communism, unbridled dog-eat-dog capitalism combined with totalitarian dictatorship - the Russians have endured it all, with pretty much the same results - a very small group of ruling elites live in relative safety and comfort and a vast underclass spend their entire lives struggling to keep body and soul together. 

*****

In Secondhand Time, people who lived under Soviet rule tell their stories of life under Soviet communism and life in the immediate aftermath of its collapse. The stories are mostly hair-raising and heartbreaking. And almost everyone is a victim, and not a perpetrator. Only one or two of the storytellers admit or even touch on the truth, which is that Stalin didn’t kill millions of people on his own. He had help. People arrested, interrogated, tortured, imprisoned, exiled their fellow citizens, and then they collected their paychecks and went home. Many of those people themselves then ended up in interrogation cells or on trains to Siberia - or dead. It seems relevant to me that no one was safe, even the people who thought that they were in Stalin’s good graces. It seems that some people should look at history, and not just in Stalinist Russia but in the United States from 2017 to now, to see how loyal a dictator is to those who are loyal to him. A personality cult is a dreadful thing. 

*****

One of the reasons why I stress about politics is because I know how much of my identity and my worldview are tied up with my American-ness. I have no idea who I am, nor where I fit in the world if I’m not an American. And I think about how being an American means something more than being born or choosing to live within the physical borders of the United States. And I also think about how fragile it all is, how easily a shared national identity with shared ideas and beliefs, even among people who disagree, can just disappear. 

This is what happened in Russia, not once but twice in one century. The country that Russians knew in 1910 was completely transformed by 1920, and everything that people believed was no longer true. The country that Russians knew in 1988 or so was completely gone by 1998, and people my age, who had grown up immersed in Soviet communism and who believed in the dignity of the worker were all of a sudden in a country that glorified cut-throat capitalism, where no one cared about politics and everyone cared about real estate and expensive cars and designer clothing. It all happened so fast, leaving a whole generation completely disoriented and alienated from their country and even from their own children who didn’t share their frame of reference. As one woman told the author, the Russia of her youth had been a country in which people boasted about their working class roots, where it was a point of great pride to be the child or grandchild of a miner or steelworker or collective farmer. In the new Russia of extravagantly wealthy oligarchs, noble ancestry came back into fashion and people started looking for their familial connections to Tsars and Grand Dukes. 

*****

Almost all of these stories are those of regular working people, not the famous or powerful, which makes the book that much more interesting to me. Maybe Alexievich wasn’t able to make connections with prominent people to ask them to tell their stories. Or maybe she did ask, and was refused. Or maybe she just prefers ordinary people. “It never ceases to amaze me how interesting everyday life really is,” she writes. This is true everywhere, I think. I never get tired of looking at people doing their work or driving their cars or just hanging around. I never get tired of routine everyday life and mundane everyday things. 

*****

Some of Alexievich’s storytellers are furiously angry at their fellow Russians, especially their children and grandchildren who no longer respect the generation that fought the Nazis and put cosmonauts in space. But some are less willing to judge their countrymen and women too harshly for their sudden shallow preoccupation with possessions. As one woman says, ”The people have suffered enough…now they go shopping…They like everything colorful because it all used to be so gray and ugly.” The longing for beauty in a country of scarcity is a repeated theme. In one story, a woman tells about how her sister had learned to knit well enough that she could sell some things to the relatively wealthy people in their village. The girls were hungry all the time and when a customer paid for her shawl, she went out and cut some flowers from her garden and gave them to the girls as a present. The woman says that this unexpected gift of flowers was a turning point for her, a moment when she realized that maybe other people could see her as something other than a dirty, scrawny street urchin, and that maybe she was meant for better things. Because someone saw her as capable of appreciating beauty, maybe that meant that she was worthy of it. It’s a beautiful and hopeful moment in a book filled with dreadful, despair-inducing stories. 

*****

Toward the end of Secondhand Time, Alexievich interviews one of the “winners” of the post-Soviet Russian economy. A single woman in her 40s with one daughter born of a liaison with an older married man, she is proud of her wealth and success and openly contemptuous of the new capitalism’s many victims. “I hate people who grew up in poverty,” she says, “their pauper’s mentality; money means so much to them, you can’t trust them.” She boasts of being a predator, a “huntress,” completely self-reliant and free of entanglements with any other humans other than her beloved daughter. It’s all very Ayn Rand-ian, and it’s easy to hate this woman but it’s also easy to see the fear that drives every word she says. “I don’t like the poor, the insulted and humiliated,” she says. No one is safe in the brutally exploitative new Russia, and she knows that if she lets down her guard for one second, she could find herself among them, among the ranks of the poor, insulted, and humiliated. 

Humiliation is another consistent theme throughout these stories. It seems that the Russians who lost everything during the early post-Soviet years felt shame even more than anger at their sudden change in circumstances. A scientist ends up cleaning bathrooms in the Metro, or an engineer finds herself selling odds and ends at a makeshift kiosk, and their biggest fear is that they’ll run into someone they know, even though so many Russians were in the same boat. They all seem able to live with the material deprivation and uncertainty about their futures, but the loss of status is unbearable. 

*****

I wasn’t sure where I was going with this, because as much as I read about Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, I still don’t know a darn thing, certainly not enough to write anything coherent. But one thing I know is that a bad system is always propped up by lies. I thought about this as I watched the Vice Presidential debate. “The rules were that you weren’t going to fact check” (translation: “I was told that I would be able to lie with impunity”) was the big takeaway for me. Yes I know that all politicians lie or exaggerate or stretch the truth or shape the truth to fit their agendas blah blah blah. And I know that the lines are now blurred between truth and lies because of the 24-hour news cycle and social media and AI blah blah blah. But there’s a difference between a person who tells a lie and a person who doesn’t understand or care about the truth. And you can spread lies with or without the aid of the internet. Stalin did an excellent job of making people believe that up was down and right was wrong, using only the technology available in 1937. 

*****

Secondhand Time is on the NYT and Guardian lists of the best books of the 21st century, and deservedly so. It’s unlike anything else written about post-Soviet Russia, and it’s a beautiful book. But I’m very glad I’m finished with these stories of collapse and upheaval and lawlessness and desperation. For now, at least.